force. War, wrote Gentilis* towards the end of sixteenth century, is the just or unjust conflict between states. Peace was now regarded as the normal condition of society. As a result of these great developments in which the name "state acquired new meaning, jurisprudence freed itself from the trammelling conditions of mediaval Scholasticism. Men began to consider the problem of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of war, to question even the possibility of a war on rightful grounds. Out of these new ideas-partly too as one of the fruits of the Reformation, †-arose the first consciously formulated principles of the science of international law, whose fuller, but not yet complete, development belongs to modern times.

From the beginning of history every age, every

* It is uncertain in what year the De Jure Belli of Gentilis was published a work to which Grotius acknowledges considerable indebtedness. Whewell, in the preface to his translation of Grotius, gives the date 1598, but some writers suppose it to have been ten years earlier.

†This came about in two ways. The Church of Rome discouraged the growth of national sentiment. At the Reformation the independence and unity of the different nations were for the first time recognised. That is to say, the Reformation laid the foundation for a science of international law. But, from another point of view, it not only made such a code of rules possible, it made it necessary. The effect of the Reformation was not to diminish the number of wars in which religious belief could play a part. Moreover, it displaced the Pope from his former position as arbiter in Europe without setting up any judicial tribunal in his stead.

in both countries; the formal declaration of war was never omitted. Many Roman writers held the necessity of a just cause for war. But nowhere do these considerations form the subject matter of a special science.

In the Middle Ages the development of these ideas received little encouragement. All laws are silent in the time of war, * and this was a period of war, both bloody and constant. There was no time to think of the right or wrong of anything, Moreover, the Church emphasised the lack of rights in unbelievers, and gave her blessing on their annihilation. The whole Christian world was filled with the idea of a spiritual universal monarchy. Not such as that in the minds of Greek and Jew and Roman who had been able to picture international peace only under the form of a great national and exclusive empire. In this great Christian state there were to be no distinctions between nations; its sphere was bounded by the universe. But, here, there was no room or recognition for independent national states with equal and personal rights. This recognition, opposed by the Roman

* The saying is attributed to Pompey :-" Shall I, when I am preparing for war, think of the laws?"

†This implied, however, the idea of a united Christendom as against the infidel, with which we may compare the idea of a united Hellas against Persia. In such things we have the germ not only of international law, but of the ideal of federation.